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Butler, Samuel (1612 - 1680)
... There can be no doubt about faith and not reason being the ultima ratio. Even Euclid, who has laid himself as little open to the charge of credulity as any writer who ever lived, cannot get beyond this. He has no demonstrable first premise. He requires postulates and axioms which transcend demonstration, and without which he can do nothing. His superstructure indeed is demonstration, but his ground his faith. Nor again can he get further than telling a man he is a fool if he persists in differing from him. He says "which is absurd," and declines to discuss the matter further. Faith and authority, therefore, prove to be as necessary for him as for anyone else.
The Way of All Flesh.
Burke, Edmund
The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded.
Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Butler, Bishop
To us probability is the very guide of life.
Preface to Analogy.
Buck, Pearl S. (1892 - 1973)
No one really understood music unless he was a scientist, her father had declared, and not just a scientist, either, oh, no, only the real ones, the theoreticians, whose language is mathematics. She had not understood mathematics until he had explained to her that it was the symbolic language of relationships. "And relationships," he had told her, "contained the essential meaning of life."
The Goddess Abides, Pt. I, 1972.
Browne, Sir Thomas (1605-1682)
[I]ndeed what reason may not go to Schoole to the wisdome of Bees, Aunts, and Spiders? What wise hand teacheth them to doe what reason cannot teach us? Ruder heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of nature, Whales, Elephants, Dromidaries and Camels; these I confesse, are the Colossus and Majestick pieces of her hand; but in these narrow Engines there is more curious Mathematicks, and the civilitie of these little Citizens more neatly sets forth the wisedome of their Maker.
In J. R. Newman (ed.), The World of Mathematics, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956, p. 1001.
Browne, Sir Thomas (1605-1682)
God is like a skilful Geometrician.
Religio Medici I, 16.
Browne, Sir Thomas (1605-1682)
All things began in Order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again, according to the Ordainer of Order, and the mystical mathematicks of the City of Heaven.
Hydriotaphia, Urn-burial and the Garden of Cyrus, 1896.
Brown, George Spencer (1923 - )
To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behaviour of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know. And yet those with the courage to tread this path to real discovery are not only offered practically no guidance on how to do so, they are actively discouraged and have to set about it in secret, pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the frantic diversions and to conform with the deadening personal opinions which are continually being thrust upon them.
The Laws of Form, 1969
Bourbaki
Structures are the weapons of the mathematician.
Bridgman, P. W.
It is the merest truism, evident at once to unsophisticated observation, that mathematics is a human invention.
The Logic of Modern Physics, New York, 1972.

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